“It feels weird following this hallway,” Stephen said. “There’s no branches.”
“At least we’re not lost.”
“I’d rather have some choices.”
“Even if there were branches, we could only decide to take one each time,” Michael said. “Maybe there are branches and we’re seeing the only one we would decide to take, anyway?”
“That would mean there’s no free will,” Stephen said.
“Not necessarily,” Michael said. “Just that we make the choices we make for whatever reasons, with no do-overs.”
“That’s personal responsibility,” Stephen said. “That doesn’t mean there’s only one possible choice for each branch.”
“If somehow the universe and everything in it reset to how it was when we left the camp, would you make the decision to leave again?”
“Knowing what I know now?”
“No,” Michael said. “Knowing what you knew then. Everything is the same.”
“Well, I suppose I might still have decided differently,” Stephen said.
“With the exact same information, the same thoughts in your head, and the same outside impetus acting upon you, you really think you might arrive at a different conclusion?” Michael asked.
“It could happen.”
“Why?” Michael asked. “How?”
“Quantum uncertainty,” Stephen said. “The electrons in my brain would be different.”
“We reset those, too.”
“You can’t reset things at a quantum level. It’s impossible.”
“We’ve already granted me the power to reset the entire universe,” Michael said. “How can doing this at a particular level of subatomic detail boggle the imagination in a way that rearranging all of creation in the first place doesn’t?”
“Because it’s science.”
“Very well, then, leaving all of that aside for the moment… do you actually feel a universe where your thoughts and actions are the result of random fluctuations is somehow less inimical to free will than one in which your decisions can be perfectly predicted?”
“Well, yeah,” Stephen said. “If nobody could predict what I’m going to do, then nothing’s set in stone. That’s free will.”
“By that logic, epileptics are the most free of all.”
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Tribe is back? Oh joy!
…Coincidentally, I had practically this exact same conversation, to the point where the first three quarters of the chapter are practically verbatim.
Fate works in mysterious ways, I guess.
(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of that statement)
Welcome back, Tribe!
And what an awesome update to come back with, too.
Hooray for Tribe’s return. Excellent chapter as always, AE.
Although, now I need to put together a Project Wonderful ad for my own story, since I told myself I’d advertise it once Tribe came back….
IT IS BACK
muy hahahahahahaha
Hooray! Tribe! I seriously love this story….
can we move away from the black bg with the white text? it’s hard for me to read. :/
Hurrah!! So glad…Now I’ll just hope it continues to update, being the sad addict I am…
And “epileptics are the most free of all….” What a fantastic line!
Yea! Tribe is back. Now we need to Kidnap AE and force her to work on Star Harbor Nights. If she doesn’t restart that soon I am going to start a third story arc for that world and start posting it in her freelance stories section.
aaror… unless you happen to be one of the previous collaborators, id suggest NOT.
last person to write fan fic like that… well… my story to the cops remains that i have no clue where they are, or why their fingers were left super glued to their keyboard.
TRIBE! How I’ve missed ye. So much have I missed ye, and so elated am I by an update, that I’m making my first AE post ever despite reading several stories for several weeks.
This chapter is brilliant even just for the last line alone. Outstanding work.
Woot!
Tribe, MU and Void Dogs all in one day.
May I live to see this day come again.
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you
Wow! i can’t beleive it! Tribe is back! I’ve been waiting for an update for way too long. I love that last line!
Please try and update Tribe a little regularly…if possible…You got me hooked on this and it’s just not fair!
I was excited to see void dogs. AND NOW TRIBE, TOO!
The sun is shining, I just heard from someone I’ve been missing, I have lovely techno in my ears, and TRIBE is has returned. Maybe karma will go back to playing by the formerly acknowledged rules and stop trying so hard to kill me! (Unlikely, sadly) But, hey, today is looking ok so far.
Thank you very very very very very very very very mucha for updating Tribe, AE! Lovelove.
Not a bad defense of determinism, but Michael still fails to establish how decisions that are predetermined by outside stimuli can be meaningfully said to belong to an individual.
Which is not to say that he’s wrong. Certainly our current understanding of science seems to live precious little room for the concept of independent choice; we know of definite deterministic physical laws and uncertain quantum fluctuations.
This fact is perhaps the best argument I know of in favor of belief in a supernatural agency beyond our present sciences. I would rather believe in a supernatural, nondeterministic soul or other source of free will, and be wrong, than accept that our choices are predetermined and be right.
This can be extended into a variant of Pascal’s wager: if we live in a deterministic world, then the rightness or wrongness of my chosen beliefs will be dictated by external events beyond my control; if we live in a nondeterministic world, then I bear complete responsibility for being right or wrong. Thus I will choose to believe in a nondeterministic world of free will, in spite of empirical and conceptual problems.
greg: I do what I can with 333 words.
However, Michael’s not arguing for determinism per se.
It might seem that way because they get bogged with Stephen’s objections, but Michael’s stance is that regardless of the agency… even allowing for an immaterial soul that’s the seat of consciousness… you will still make only ONE decision.
Grant that we have a soul, immaterial and apart from the domino rally cause-and-effect physical universe. Grant that this soul is the seat of consciousness and our decisions spring from it. Grant that some agency can cause the universe to “rewind” at will, with thoughts and memories reset along with gross matter. Imagine we go back to the last time you ordered pizza. Why would you order pepperoni “this time” if you’d ordered cheese “last time”? What would be different, in your thoughts and your soul?
Wouldn’t your reasons for deciding on cheese, even if it was just “the whim of your soul”, still be the same?
If we replayed that moment a million times and you–you yourself, you your soul–made a different decision one time, then that itself suggests a random outside influence, doesn’t it? Because otherwise, why wouldn’t you have decided what you decided the other times?
This isn’t an argument against free will. It’s an argument against the idea that free will and determinism are opposites.
To frame it differently: if somebody had enough information to predict your actions with 50% accuracy, would that make you half-un-willed? Of course not. So what about 60%? 70%? 80%? At what percent of personal predictability does free will go away?
I’d maintain that even at 100%, free will still remains. The “deciding factor” in whether or not we’re free-willed is the “deciding factor”. If you make the decisions, then you’re free willed. That’s not a condition that can be tested for, of course.
333 word updates make me enjoy your writing in a way that MU/Void/SHN don’t quite touch. Thank you so very much for making writing your full time job! Now to go begin The 3 Seas…
“You can’t reset things at a quantum level. It’s impossible.”
“We’ve already granted me the power to reset the entire universe,” Michael said. “How can doing this at a particular level of subatomic detail boggle the imagination in a way that rearranging all of creation in the first place doesn’t?”
“Because it’s science.”
I will grant that the epileptic line was powerful and the deterministism arguments deserving of the spotlight (being the main subject of the entire chapter) but, for my money, this is the exchange that will stick with me the longest. Hurrah for fellow bitter anti-scientist emotions! It’s quite flooring to witness this level of insight into the measured stupidity of researchers in someone that wasn’t (I’m assuming, despite the infamous consequences) burned in some way by the profession.
I will concede that it is a very formidable conceptual barrier, yes. I’ve taken a good running start on this one a couple of times, and gotten my brain knocked flat. About the best I can come up with is the “plain cussedness” theory, that our conscience may be supernaturally aware of attempts to observe, predict, and control our behavior and will take deliberately contrary actions to foil them.
Yes, I’m kidding. Mostly.
But even if we grant the idea of a higher agency with the power to rewind the entire physical state of the universe to the same decision point, it seems to me that the very act of doing so has to create a change on some level. The idea of a higher agency hitting the rewind button in order to observe the choice made at a certain decision point implies some form of causality. I am having trouble conceiving of a framework in which the rewind could be said not to have occurred in some sense, even if said sense is not evident within the physical state of the universe; if the rewind is allowed to reset the universe into a state in which the rewind has not occured, this seems to me to lead to a paradox.
The only resolution I see is if you further grant the rewind the ability to erase all information relating to the rewind, which means that one, there is no longer any way to determine whether the decision was the same or different as “before” since that information is gone with the rewind; and two, if the world does operate in a deterministic fashion you’ve just totally set up a perpetual loop since the same events leading up to the rewind will still occur, meaning whatever higher agency decided to rewind will do so again.
I guess now we know where Groundhog’s Day came from. Except since that loop eventually got broken, we know that the universe cannot be deterministic, ‘cuz you can’t argue with Bill Murray and Harold Ramis.
So, we get ONE decision… and I am unable to conceptualize a scenario in which it is possible to even determine if we would have potentially made the same decision over again, since any act of observation would require a state change of some sort. Mmm. At the moment this seems to strengthen Michael’s argument, actually, although it’s too late for my brain to stink thraight.
The “higher agency”, by virtue of being higher, is outside the universe “looking in”… we can assume time moves forward in some sort of linear fashion out of sync with the universe, allowing the higher agency to observe the same events unfolding.
The only reason we’d have to grant that information within the universe changes because of the rewind is to account for the “some change” that is demanded to account for why decisions might unfold differently, and if that’s your argument all you’re doing is demonstrating once again how “non-determinism” isn’t the same thing as free will. If it takes a random outside change for your decision to change…
Nobody has ever given me a clear answer to why our actions being “set in stone” in this fashion would mean we don’t have free will, except to repeat over and over again “But if a higher agency can perfectly predict our actions, we’re just following a script!” which does not follow at all. I get the emotional reaction to the idea that our actions could be predicted, but the logic doesn’t hold.
If we had a script that we were following in place of free will, then our actions would be predictable, yes… but that doesn’t mean the reverse is true. It’s logic that a child can follow: “I see what I eat” is not “I eat what I see.”
The “cussedness” that Stephen illustrates by insisting that he MIGHT pick something different isn’t necessary because the so-called “deterministic” universe Michael describes is NOT antithetical to freewill.
Alright, let’s make this simple. What exactly is the functional difference, then, between the case where our actions are predictable because we’re just following a script and the case where our actions are predictable but we nonetheless have free will?
If I know that stimuli X, Y, and Z will provoke reaction A from a person, and stimuli W, U, and V will provoke reaction B from a rock, I have a hard time distinguishing one or the other as having more or less free will.
(Of course, maybe I’m just being needlessly pessimistic. Conversely, it could be that rocks share the same free will we do and lead altogether more fulfilling lives than previously thought.)
I agree, there really is no difference, beyond which one might make you more comfortable to believe. But why should you be gloomy? If your actions are predetermined, whether by an invisible superman or merely by virtue of being the result of all previous actions, there’s nothing you can do to change it. Your only choice (however fake it may be) is whether to be happy about it or not, and the former seems to lead to a more fulfilling life.
The statement about quantum uncertainty isn’t as foolish as it’s made to seem. Of course the whole reversal of the universe business is hypothetical, but there is nevertheless something different about resetting me walking to the store and resetting quantum movements. You might play the tape, watch a subatomic particle walk to the store (so to speak), and as you rewind it watch the particle, instead of reversing its motions, buy a baked potato. Unpredictability goes hand in hand with being irreversible; its actions are unpredictable no matter which way time is moving. If you really can’t stand the idea that you have no free will, it’s not hard to convince yourself that this works if it makes you feel better. Science is beginning to progress beyond an outdated Victorian cause-and-effect view, but almost no one is ready to accept it, including the scientists.
Well, yes. And that is why I reject Michael’s argument that free will is compatible with determinism (at least a purely physical determinism; I suppose it may potentially be possible to reconcile it with a dualistic determinism).
It is my view that any meaningful definition of free will must by necessity include a qualitative distinction between how the behavior of free individuals is determined and how the behavior of nonfree objects is. If both are wholly dependent on the same immutable deterministic physical laws, then any distinction that could be made would be a purely quantitative one. If I pick up a rock and throw it, the mechanics of the thought processes through which this gets carried out are many, many orders of magnitude more complicated than the mechanics of the rock’s flight. But if at a root level they are made up of the same deterministic physical interactions, and my thought processes simply involve more of them, then it becomes difficult if not impossible to define my actions as free in a way that the rock’s are not.
I find I am actually fairly comfortable with randomness, regardless of the source. If neither the rock’s actions nor mine can be predicted through deterministic laws, then my status vis a vis the rock’s is at the very least indeterminate; room exists for a distinction where it would not in a purely deterministic world.
At any rate, I like to think that I am, on the whole, not particularly gloomy about the problem (although I confess I was tying my brain in knots a bit last night), simply because I choose to believe that I can choose to believe. I don’t care if the true nature of the world is ultimately deterministic, even if this would mean that I truly do not have free will, because I can simply believe otherwise.
@greg: This is just it… Michael’s argument is independent of whether or not your thoughts are part of the same deterministic system as other matter.
He’s saying determinism (in the standard sense) or no determinism, you would still pick the same thing each and every “time”. This is not an infringement on your free agency… it is a vindication of it. Whetever decision you make is valid, in that you made it for whatever reasons you held.
Replay the universe, same outcome, because your decision is still your decision.
For you to do things differently the “second time”, there’d have to be an outside (or random internal) agency impinging upon your actions.
“If there’s only one possible outcome, then there’s no free will.” Underpants Gnome Logic! Where’s the step which connects those two things?
If there is free will, all that means is that your free will is what leads to the decision to zig or zag… your will does not lead to the absence of determinism; instead, it becomes the determinator.
If your decision is the predictably determined result of a system of outside stimuli, what makes your decision uniquely yours at all? Well, obviously there is the subjective evidence of our senses. If, however, our consciousness is derived in deterministic fashion from the physical world, then how do you account for the distinction of ownership? If we live in a non-deterministic world, then you could potentially point to random variations in your behavior and say “See this? This is different.” That’s not necessarily good enough to prove free will, of course, but it is a necessary prerequisite.
But in a deterministic world, all actions are equally part of the same predictable, interrelated system. How, out of this essential sameness, can you point to a set of actions as belonging uniquely to you? Even if you were to arbitrarily declare a set of actions as being yours, how do you go about distinguishing your free actions as being free as opposed to the nonfree actions of objects which presumably do not possess free will, if all actions are equally predictable based on all other actions?
@greg:
How?
Like so: “I declare these actions to be mine.”
The final answer here is that there is no test for free will and can never be a test for free will. It’s unprovable and unfalsifiable. You seem to have acknowledged this yourself.
However, the fact that free will cannot be proven bothers people, so they jump onto the imaginary dichotomy of freedom vs. determinism, and try to deny determinism in order to “prove” free will.
My take on it is: it does not matter if we’re free willed or not. It’s the same either way.
As it cannot be proven one way or another… as the results are the same either way… even to the point of free will leading to the same repetition in our “universal rewind” thought experiment that would be present without free will… then we can say that we have free will and be “correct.”
It does not matter on any level whether we are right or wrong… and indeed, the answer to that question does not exist. Our experience is the same whether we have free will or not, because the unvierse is the same whether we have free will or not, because any hypothetical higher agency that is or is not going to condemn or reward us for actions will do so irrespective of whether or not we have free will… the actual existence or non-existence of free will has no impact on anything.
Given all that, I choose to believe that I have free will and am absolutely unperturbed by the lack of proof on the subject.
It’s not the lack of proof that gets to me, it’s the lack of definition. If the world has a nondeterministic random element, free will still can’t be proven, but there is room for something that could be free will. A deterministic world lacks this wiggle room.
Suppose I take a model of a deterministic world and map out everything that ever happened and that ever will happen in that world. Every single action on the map is the product of all preceding actions; there is no particular seperation between an action and its immediate causes, and no action originates in itself in any part. I can go through the map and look up the point where someone picks up a rock and throws it (action A) and the point where the rock flies through the air (action B). We would assume action B is a nonfree action triggered by action A… but there is no functional difference between action A and action B. They are thoroughly the same type of action.
In a model of a nondeterministic world, we could still map out everything that had ever happened up to a certain point, although not everything that will happen in the future since that could not be known in advance. The difference would be that the nondeterministic map would have discontinuity; each action would not always be the simple product of its previous actions. A nondeterministic action would have a clear distinction from their prior actions; it would originate in part seperately and uniquely on its own (at least relative to all other actions on the map). This action introduces this random element; that action introduces that random element.
The status of free will would still be indeterminate, yes. But you could take actions A and B again and there could potentially be a difference in type between them: assuming a thoroughly nondeterministic world there would be a small part of action B which was unrelated to prior actions (including A), and a small part of action A which was unrelated to its prior actions. “Free” action A may or may not contain some element that “nonfree” action B does not, but we cannot know whether it does or not since we cannot seperate the nondeterministic part into its constituent elements. But it could, and that is the distinction that I make between a deterministic model and a nondeterministic one.
Existentialism . . . *headdesk*
I’m still waiting for the guy with the 2×4.